Theophilous Thunderwulf says: What have you done to fuck with people? Was it a long, carefully planned piece of psychological warfare, or do you favour quick, off-the-cuff comments that confuse the terminally gullible? Have you been dicked with, and only realised many years later? Are you being dicked right now? Tell us everything.

Many years ago my friend bought a Nokia N-gage.
One of those poncey (yet crappy) gaming phones. He wouldn't shut up about it for the week beforehand."I'm getting a new phone in a week - a Nokia N-gage""I'll have my phone in 4 days""2 days time I'll be playing better games than that on my phone""18 hours and I'll picking up my N-gage"Just generally being a complete technotwat about it. You know the kind.For that reason I waited 'til he'd owned it for a couple of hours and sent him a text that went something like this:

Hey! Did you get the Ngage? How i# ## ######**MESSAGE CORRUPTED****ERROR 843****REBOOTING MESSAGE**Hey! Did you get the Ngage? How i# ## ######**MESSAGE CORRUPTED****ERROR 843****MESSAGE TERMINATED**

A few minutes later I got a text back asking me to repeat myself, because my text was all garbled. I replied with:

And then, nothing. No reply. I waited about an hour and called him.Turns out he was already on a bus back into town with his malfunctioning phone...
(Paolo Nutini's BikiniBetter than Frederick Fleet's optometrist, Mon 16 Jan 2012, 12:00,
7 replies)

Young love and the life-changing discovery…

During the 90s I was an underachieving adolescent, naive in the way of love. Yet that all changed when we moved house and I found myself on the same street as Jessica.

Jessica was a vibrant young beauty who was two years older than me, and possessed that rare quality of innocence, combined with wisdom that showed maturity beyond her years. Add to this a startlingly pretty face, a sexy, rebellious attitude, and the kind of body that was cumly, yet staggeringly well proportioned…she quickly became the school crush, the kind of girl that the local pervs would perv over, whilst they silently rued the day that they were born, because they were the wrong age for her and had missed their timeline of opportunity…they knew they would never have a chance…but I did. I was the lucky one.

Jessica was also quite new to the neighbourhood, and already there were rumours circulating that she had a ‘secret’ past…yet of course I wasn’t interested in that – all I cared about was the fact that she could teach me things I would never learn in any classroom. However, little did I know or could ever expect, what was to happen in the next few days. I was besotted, completely under her spell…transfixed with a complete sense of purpose as if she was the very thing I was born for.

It started quite by accident – she had dropped her books in the school hallway when there was no-one else around. As she stooped to pick them up I was stunned…my teenage eyes were glued to the sight of the picture-perfect posterior as she bent over to pick up the bag. Yet I was wise enough to realise that this could be construed as un-gentleman-like conduct, so I leapt forward and offered to help her collect her things. She was very appreciative, and gave me a look that burned into my very soul. We got to talking, and despite my crippling shyness I managed to apply a modicum of charm to the conversation. Before I knew it, I found myself invited back to her house that evening.

The rest of the school day seemed to drag forever, but eventually the time came for me to tentatively approach her front door and give it a sturdy knock, trying desperately to not seem too enthusiastic. Jessica quickly answered and informed me that her parents were away for the evening, so we would have hours…just the two of us…alone.

Within moments we were kissing…firmly yet passionately and our hands explored each other...pulling us closer together as we stumbled into her bedroom. We fell onto the bed and began writhing together, our bodies and tongues entwined and our pace quickening, grabbing at each other as we grew more impatient under the pure unadulterated intensity of our feelings. Then, in an effort to regain some control, she gently pushed me away…I considered for a moment that she might be having second thoughts, but then she started smiling seductively, and slowly sliding out of her skirt and her small lace panties, before laying back on the bed. She began to gasp breathlessly as she tenderly inserted her fingers ever-so-gently in and out of herself. As I hurriedly undressed I watched on…quivering in anticipation, and savouring every delicious moment.

‘Come here…be gentle’ she said, coaxing me on with words that were as controlling and purposeful as they were erotic and exhilarating

I approached her but then…as I leaned closer….closer…the most staggering and unexpected thing that I have ever experienced before or since struck me like a thunderbolt. The realisation still now makes me tremble with the sheer, hormone filled shock and awe of it all…It was the single most incredible thing that I, or any other living being was going to experience, and my life was never going to be the same again…

Smoke alarm with expired batteries.
A year or so back after a very boozy party Mrs Gabber and I stayed in a friends spare bedroom. After a minute or so of getting into bed I heard the telltale bip of a smoke alarm warning that it needed its battery replacing. A quick search of the room found the offending item and I went to relocate it somewhere else.

It was at that point that our plan was hatched.

Our hosts hadn't yet gone to bed so I snuck into their bedroom hid the noisy little bastard underneath their bed and returned to my already giggling wife.

If anyone has heard one of these before it lets off a brief, loud but very intermittent high pitch squeaking noise. It's also very hard to locate if you don't know where it is as the sound is so sporadic and short.

I think it took the wife and I at least an hour to get to sleep as we spent so long pissing ourselves with laughter every time we heard the faint, telltale noise coming from their room.

Turns out my mate slept through it all he was so wrecked but his wife was on edge for most of the night.
(Airman GabberLiving life like a 70's BBC presenter, Mon 16 Jan 2012, 11:43,
Reply)

One morning
At breakfast, my four-year was trying to read the blurb on the box of baby rusks her little sister was eating from, and asked me what finger food was.

I convinced her it was food made out of fingers. She went to school in tears, thinking that we were raising our family on human remains.
(MattDP(Squiggle), Mon 16 Jan 2012, 11:41,
Reply)

I can't find it
One of my favourite oldie posts was from someone who worked out how to make their door-bell ring by messing with the wires under the floorboards in their bedroom. They drove their parents spare and it made me cry with laughter reading it, but I can't find it!

He had it comming
At one place I worked a guy who worked in the stores, Dave, had clearly left a village bereft.

The man in charge of the stores took him under his wing and made sure he gave him just enough work to keep him occupied, but not so much that it’d overload his limited faculties. Dave was daft but mainly happy, and never more so than when he went about his business singing Kylie songs loudly and badly.

Some years after I left Dave’s company I was watching an episode of Xfactor and there he was auditioning in front of the judges! He’d been wheeled out as one of the ‘sad cases’ to provide light relief from the serious business of finding a bubblegum pop act.

I knew that it was impossible to speak with him without immediately realising that he’s got some pretty severe learning difficulties. But that hadn’t stopped the production team pulling him out of the crowd, building up his hopes and putting him on national television.

The look of shock and confusion on his face when the judges started laughing at him was priceless. From next international pop star to laughing stock in 20 seconds.
(Ring Of FireA petty, drooling belming butthurt retard., Mon 16 Jan 2012, 10:45,
7 replies)

Don't know whever this is relevent but it certainly messed with my head.
When I was a about 8 years old, my mother was going out with a man I shall call Victor for that's is the cunts name.

This story is about betrayal to my mam and fucking with my head so get comfy.

Right then, In my class in primary school there was this boy named Darren and for some strange reason I was encouraged to befriend him so far to the point that I would go to his house and Victor would drop me off there and stay for a while. This was unusual but being 8 didn't really think anything of it. Now Darren was (And is as far as I know) a complete prick, At first we got along, We often play together and have a laugh as kids would do but after a while he would bully me to the point of making me crying like a loon. A few months pass of this abuse from him when one day when I come home from school, My mam and Victor are having a huge argument and she is clearly pissed off. It was only a few hours later that I found out that from her that Victor had been cheating on my mam and was banging Darren's mother, How my mam found out I don't know but it was only about 10 years later that I realised why I was getting bullied by him.

I realised that Victor somehow convinced me or/and mam to befriend him so that he could have his way with Darren's mother who he met somehow, I believe that Darren knew what was going on and was determined to make my life hell as a result as his mam was married and he probably thought that it was my fault about what was going on. That messed with my head a lot not only because of the bullying but of the betrayal that my mam went through. But alas we had the last laugh as me my mam and my brother also with the help of a friend of my mam's ripped all his clothes, broke his (at the time) expensive hi-fi stereo, wrote 'cunt' over it and ruined his prized Jackie Chan videos.

Never saw him again and I had to put up with Darren's bullying for another two years until I started comp. As a result I can't really trust people any more as I can only see them as backstabbing head messing pricks, except for future Mrs Speed I trust her with all my heart.

On a quick note I'd like to say this to Darren Bowen and Victor McCracken

"YOU ARE COMPLETE AND UTTER CUNTS AND I HOPE YOU BOTH DIE"
(Claude Speedwas a Roman called Claudius Speedicus, Mon 16 Jan 2012, 10:35,
15 replies)

TCT – or ‘Thick Cunt Trevor’…

Now our friend Trevor is a great guy, although a bit ‘naïve’ to say the least. Suffice to say he has been the subject of a couple of our good natured wind-ups and japes over the years. We started small (with the whole ‘if you type ‘Google’ into Google bit)…but then we cranked it up a notch or two…

Here is just a selection of what he fell for:

We informed him that Immigrants were paying smugglers to fly them over the UK and chuck them out with parachutes and fake IDs. The ‘catch’ being that if they landed within the mainland, they had not physically ‘crossed our shores’ (airspace didn’t count, you see) so they could automatically be called UK citizens, and were thusly entitled to free private healthcare and a membership card to Blockbuster Video. For weeks we would snigger to ourselves as TCT, a chirpy and vicarious racist, pointed at anybody remotely foreign-looking and accused them of being a ‘Scrounging skydiving scumbag!’

Then there was the time a couple of us told him that we had all ‘seen the light’ and signed up for the Church of Scientology… We added that we were lucky to make it in time as they only had a couple of places left on L. Ron’s mothership. Hilarity ensued when he bolted straight to the nearest recruitment centre, signed over all of his belongings to the Thetan brotherhood and requested a window seat.

We once gave him the scoop about some ‘Nurses’ who had revealed to us that the ultimate sexual pleasure could be obtained by the sensation of steam on the male G-Spot. We discovered later that he had gone home, bent over and inserted the entire spout from a freshly boiled kettle right up his own puckering papper-passage. He blistered and scalded his cack-canyon so badly that he had to wear a cotton-wool stuffed nappy for three weeks and suffered massive internal damage. How we howled.

We once let him in on the secret that a local group of pensioners used Crown Green Bowls competitions as a front whilst they mastermind a devilish plot to close down all public houses and convert them into Werthers Originals factories. My rectum prolapsed with mirth when, driven batshit with rage, TCT went out into the street and viciously battered a pair of old grannies who just happened to be crossing the street at the time.

We managed to convince him that the illuminati had joined forces with David Icke’s lizard people in order to bring about the end of the world in December (20122012). To his credit, he initially seemed sceptical, but then got himself all suspicious when he saw Gary the barman and said he looked ‘a bit lizardy’. After asking for advice on how to repel this evil, we informed him of the ‘fact’ that lizards were scared by the smell of petrol. Subsequently, I almost LoL’d myself inside-out as he sprinted to the nearest petrol station, covered himself in super unleaded, declared himself ‘immune’…and then lit a cigarette to celebrate. ‘You guys!’ he exclaimed, as his charred body crackled in the extreme heat of the fireball that followed.

Finally, we told him that wikileaks had discovered that Saddam Hussein was not dead, but had undergone a sex-change and facial reconstructive surgery in return for signing over all the Iraqi oil reserves. We added that he was now living the sweet life running a kebab shop on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. As you can imagine, we chortled ourselves into comas when we saw on the news that TCT had murdered the entire staff of the ‘Istanbul Palace’ in Wavendon before turning the gun on himself and blowing his own face off.

Whenever I’m a guest in someone’s home
I always sneak into the loo and take the ballcock out of the toilet cistern so it can’t be flushed. Messing with people’s heads.
(TheManWithThePlancussed your mum on, Mon 16 Jan 2012, 9:12,
17 replies)

West Yorkshire Metro Merry-go-round
Boarded the bus home from town yesterday around 3pm, put my shopping bag on the luggage rack at the front and squeezed down the bus to sit at the back.

Got home sans bag, fuck. Now normally I'd let it go but in the bag was a copy of inglorious bastards (3 quid) and me tea and I was buggered if I was going to pay twice as much again for food at the local shop so I set in motion a cunning plan to get it back, one which might just work.

I knew that the bus must turn round somewhere up the road and I knew it didn't have far to go before then. Computer was on so I consulted the timetable - here

I had 27 minutes before it was back round again hopefully with Brad Pitt, Christopher Waltz, Mann Kruger, Melanie Laurent and my chilli con carnie still on board. The stop was only 10 mins away and what's more the launderette was on the way, so if I was quick I could scamper down, toss the washing in the machine, set it running and still have time to pick up the bag as it came back around to the stop opposite the one I normally get off at.

Bit ambitious the launderette bit. I rounded the corner only to see the bus fly past on the opposite side of the street. But all was not lost - it still had MY orange Sainsbury bag resplendent in the luggage tray where the free papers usually go during the week. If it worked at one end maybe it could happen again at the other end. The return leg was much longer - it had to go out past Pudsey and that's practically in the next county - so I had time for the washing to finish and then dry.

With clothes clean dry and folded I set off again for the stop, eager to see the screen displaying the ETA of the next buses. 42 was due in 8 mins then another in 17, then another, then another. Three buses later It came it to view. It was my bus with my bag with my video and my tea and victory was in sight I got on, showed my pass and sat down, beside myself with joy.

But I can't get off at the next stop can I? Take it with me? Everyone's just seen me get on with my washing, the bus was full, the bag was obviously there when I got on. How could it possibly be mine? What did I do? - I waited till there was just me an a little old lady on board. I just wanted her to get off and quick. But no she went for the shopping, the little witch, started poking around in MY shopping bag. I had to do something. I got up and wrestled it out of grubby little hands sayinh "it's my shopping I'd left it on and had to wait and get on the bus when It came round again". I felt like I was going to die.

Messing With People's heads? - I'm going to do it again next week but this time I'm going to leave a tuba on board (or possibly a french horn) and I WILL get off at the next stop and I will play them all a fucking tune on it as the bus pulls away.

I'll admonish you in a minute...
A good skill of mine is sounding authoritative even when spouting copious amounts of rollocks. This allows me to convince friends of spurious facts etc that are so unbelievable that they are believable.

Sitting in a pub with my friend Kim, we got on to the meanings of words. I convinced her that the word "admonish" meant 'to wave ones penis wildly in another persons face'.

I didn't expect her to believe this for a minute, but she accepted this. I have since got her to confirm the meaning of admonish to other friends, leading to being threatened with an admonishing is not just a mild threat but something to be avoided.
(triley, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 21:26,
Reply)

Uncle Mike (for that was his name)
About 10 years ago, I worked with a guy who didn't really get much respect from others, but had plenty for himself, so it all balanced out. He was the type who would jump into others' conversations to explain the punchlines of jokes just told, or use his truck to block the way into the parking lot from the street. Ha ha.

Every day, without exception, his lunch consisted of a baloney sandwich on white bread, with a container of skim milk, which he would place in the employees' fridge in the morning.

One fateful day, at lunchtime, he took out his sandwich to find a bite had been taken.
(Squilliambut . . . . *I'm* the one with all the talent!, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 20:31,
3 replies)

Learning disabled lad
I come from quite a boring shithole village somewhere in the countryside with an abandoned farm nearby. In my early thirties our usual source of entertainment would be to hang around an local ex boxer and hardman's house (sonny) and generally drink, use drugs and buy e's to sell in the local social club.

Now there was a young man called antony who had learning difficulties who we would get to run errands for us (going to the shops and that), he was our main source of entertainment and his older brother had recently left for the army so without the protection of him he was at our mercy. Sonny was a bit of a bully to him but we mostly got on, we got him stoned once an Sonny made one of the local slags shag him which we all interrupted and jumped on the bed.

One time we all went up to a castle to do lsd, we gave him a load, left him with a rope and he hung himself

I think I saw his brother in town the today GULP
(SickRikfloat like a camembert sting like a brie, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 20:04,
22 replies)

The Wazzock will get you!
I used to teach at a high school in Essex back in the late 90s. Every year we'd take the Yr7s (11-12yr olds) camping for a week. It was a great activity, the whole year group would bond together and we'd have an excuse to have some staff bonding time too!

However, I decided to tell the kids about the Wazzock. Half badger-half Fox that were about in the area. That they'd be out in the campsite at night and could attack them. They'd need their torches and after-dark it was best to stay in their tents. You can see the plan.

Other staff got in on the act and so did a number of parents too.

"I asked my mum what a Wazzock was and she said I was one"........

So 15 large canvas tents, kids eating all sorts of unhealthy snacks that they had squirrelled away and you can guess the keeping tents clean was not on their list of priorities.

So a dark night and we as staff decide to go out and find a tent where we could hear chattering. One of us just runs our fingernails over the canvas. It all goes hush for a while. Talking starts again and then another one decides to run our nails over the canvas. Then we hear screaming from another tent, our tent begins to scream. We run over to hear the kids going "It was in the tent" - "the Wazzocks were in the tent - I felt them". "It has had my crisps".

Next night we find that the kids have been leaving so much rubbish in their tents and it was a campsite that was used a fair bit that the local Grey Squirrel population would visit the tents at night and clean up any food.

We got very little bother and clean tents upon inspection for the rest of the week!
(calidris, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 19:26,
Reply)

Why I No Longer Post
Because reading is less of a bitch
(Cydonijawell it sure as shit ain't sad, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 17:22,
12 replies)

the thumbtack defense
I thought this was a good example of counter-psychological warfare:

In high school a friend of mine would routinely punch me on the body when I least expected it. I had a long torso with very little protective tissue like fat or muscle, and my gangly arms, though quick, were not a strong line of defense, so I made an excellent target and the punches were hard enough to be aggravating. On the bus? Punch the body. Having lunch? Punch the body. Walking somewhere? Punch the body. This was making me unusually jumpy throughout the day, so I was desperate for an elegant solution that didn't involve asking him to stop.

After pondering the problem for a day, I settled on a solution. Before school the next morning I took a handful of thumb tacks and pressed them through the inside of my undershirt at various places, so the flat back of the tack was against my skin, and the pointy bit was poking outward, nearly invisible on its own, and undetectable with another shirt placed over it.

At the beginning of the day at school I told my friend about my new system, and showed him one as an example. It turns out that this was all it took. For the rest of the day he would wind up and start to throw a punch out of habit, and suddenly jerk back, remembering what might be under there. I only actually used the tacks for a day or two, but I never got punched by him again.

We remain friends to this day, but he works with very sharp knives now so I don't go see him too often.
(the prick of miserypierced my foot on a spiiiike on, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 17:13,
3 replies)

stupid furry animals
you know those little fluffy grey things on a willow tree that turn into catkins? i managed to sell quite a few of those to my classmates as pets, telling them that they were in a state of hibernation and would emerge in a week or so as cute little furry butterflies, that could be trained.as the week passed and nothing happened, i told them that they'd clearly not looked after their "pets" properly and, as a result, they'd died during hibernation.you may well think i was being a cunt, but we were 14 years old at the time. i really didn't think they'd have been that stupid.
(Smash Monkeyis going off the rails on a crazy train, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 16:59,
4 replies)

The road to Failure is paved with the best intentions
As university students of the mid 1990s, we were stereotypes, and as such everyone in the house smoked quite a lot of pot, and had a really zany, mad and wacky sense of humour.

One evening on returning home, I went to my room to find that one of the posters on my wall was upside down.

I corrected it, and went downstairs to enquire why.

"Oh yeah", came the reply, "We were going to move everything in your room by an inch each day, but we got bored and so just did that".

Fair enough, thought I but thought such Twits-style ingenuity would indeed be a superb prank to pull by anyone with enough time, boredom and effort on their hands.
(Je suis un vagabondis an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 16:04,
8 replies)

Don't mess with an engineer unless you want to wake up with a waste hose in your bunk...
My manager was something of a dick (unnecessarily loud conversations over speakerphone, read his emails aloud for no reason, put me in hospital twice, etc.) so when he followed the office trend and bought a subscription to popular the MMORPG, EVE Online, I figured that having had 2 years head-start on him, now was time for some anonymous revenge.

I set up a new account, and two new characters (one on my old account, one on the new) and got a friend to do the same. Red Tomak and Black Tomak (yes, the cyclepath joke) along with my mate's chars would track him down, and destroy him once he got into anything Battlecruiser sized or larger.

We waited for about 6 months, I endured his many stories of how clever he was transporting frozen plant seeds 30 jumps away for 5 ISK profit a unit (like paying Eddie Stobart 1p per 10 miles), and constantly telling us in the office where he was based.

One night, we decided it was time. We kitted out our little frigates, found him and we blew him up. The next day, he told the office where he'd moved to, and that night, we found him and we blew him up... and so on for a week.

Various ransom demands were sent for trivial items (1000 cases of spiced wine and 250 exotic dancers) which he refused to pay "on principle". So the next day, he told the office where he was now based, and that night, we found him and we blew him up. His battle reports got more and exaggerated, and one time he told us that he'd won and beaten us - when he hadn't - not knowing that it was us all along.

So, the next day he thought he was clever, and undocked in a battlecruiser. We made short work of that, and then, swearing and cursing in local chat enough to make a seasoned docker blush - we podded him, he woke up in the station again, and undocked in front of us in his biggest hardiest battleship.

We blew that up too. but while his shields, armour, and hull swiftly depleated, my friend and I came to a realisation on Teamspeak. There was no way he'd had time to update his clone. If we podded him now, surely he'd lose about 6 months worth of skill points. We dragged him away from the station. We blew up his ship. We podded him. He went into expletive overload. I swear I could hear his screams from my home, 20 miles away. The next day he confirmed our suspicions. He'd lost millions of ISK of ship and kit, along with millions of skill points. He was off the scale kinda mad. Everyone in the office knew it was me, except him. No-one told him.

Well - I did, 6 months later. Turns out he still wasn't over it. Went bloody ballistic in the middle of the office he did. Totally worth it though :-)

TL:DR; My manager was a dick. I blew up his imaginary spaceships. He went mental with rage and never got over it.
(lifsonis a female..., Sun 15 Jan 2012, 15:22,
20 replies)

Annoy-a-tron tomfoolery
There is a good friend of mine who shall remain nameless who is the butt of many a jape in the name of comedy; since I have known him we have committed petty acts of tomfoolery such as subscribing him to various free adult contact magazines or stealing his remote control doorbell button to be operated from the nearby curry house. The level of humour this poor fellow has had to put up with has got to the point that, when his car was stolen from his drive, he actually walked round to my house to see if it vanishing was part of a comedic ruse...

When he was finely encouraged to move into his new house, a whole bunch of his friends would pop in to ooh and aah at his new abode; and a fine pad it is too. Being a very diligent individual (as he works in insurance) he invested heavily in builders, plumbers and electricians to fix all the minor niggles pointed out in the various surveys he had commissioned during the purchasing process.

Whilst all of this was going on, I had recently been the lucky purchaser of a couple of Annoy-a-trons from ThinkGeek. These tasty little gadget would emit a high pitched chirp (similar to that which might be heard from any number of electrical gadgets) at random intervals, infrequent enough to prevent one from identifying the source but loud and frequent enough to be damn annoying - the product name in this instance was spot-on.

I secreted one of them in the kitchen, behind the radiator, and another in his bedroom, again behind the radiator - and quickly made my excuses and left.

I can only imagine what a fun night Andrew (ooops, damn there is his name) had lying in bed listening to the occasional chirp from electrical devices unknown, but I do know that he instructed the electrical and plumbing contractors he had employed for the next few days to forget what they were working and find the source of the noise...

I think it took about 8 hours until the first was discovered, and only a short time following for the second - and it only cost him the hourly rate of 2 contractors @ 8 hours a piece....
(terminalsanta, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 15:03,
5 replies)

Pea Roast
When I was evil step dad to two rather lovely little girls I used to take great pleasure in concocting all manner of lies to answer their questions, and believe me little kids can ask questions all day long.

One particularly inspired untruth occurred one day when littlest saw the pool table key I had attached to my key ring. This key was one of those round ones, like to a bicycle lock, and she asked what it was. Being the quick witted fellow I am I pronounced that it was the key to her belly button, into which it miraculously fitted. The story followed that when she was even littler she used to eat things she shouldn't and the doctors, fed up of opening her up every time, just gave me and her mum the key to her belly. Having not eaten the wrong things for a while the key slot, I informed her, had grown over so I could no longer open her belly, and that explained why she was the only member of the family with an out-ie belly button.

Aged 6, three years on, she still believes this lie, and whenever she sees someone with a d-lock key she proudly announces that I have one of them, and it's the key to her belly.
(monkeyboyalphajumping on the bandwagon since, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 13:33,
Reply)

Being mean to Germans
Aged about 10 on a South Coast beach, building sandcastles with my cousin when a young German lad who was on holiday with his parents came to join us. He spoke good English due to his English mother, but had a problem remembering certain words (unfortunately our German was not entirely perfect).

One such word was the English for the sun-induced redness on his neck. Before I, charitable soul that I am, could help him out my cousin cut across me, poker-faced, and informed him that 'gayrash' was the expression for which he was searching.

Obviously, as ten year olds, the sight of him going back to his mother to inform her that he had a bad case of the gayrash was 'THE HEIGHT OF COMEDY'.

An American came to visit
Many years back, I was part of a volunteering group, who were close-knit socially and tended to hang out a lot. One summer, an eager American college student who was a pen friend of one of us came to stay. We welcomed the gushing, grinning lad and took turns in hosting him. He said he wanted to learn all about British culture, so we convinced him that:

* Poking your head out of a car window with a yell of "Wanker!" is a chirpy British greeting.

* Welsh people are called "Whalies" and their currency is "Whale coin". We got him to pop into a bank on the way to Wales to change £40 into whale coin so he'd have some spends. (He was in there a good while before re-emerging, scratching his head and protesting about the manager.)

* The traditional British breakfast is fried bread butties. We had him grinning like a loon while frying hunks of bread, sandwiching between two dry slices and serving them up to bemused guests.

* People playing guitars in subways etc. are immigration agents who work for the police, and they'll arrest anybody with a non-British accent. When seeing them, approach them first, announce your name and country of residence and show them all your papers.

* If striking up conversation with strangers (e.g. on a bus), a good, safe and neutral topic is farts.

...plus other stuff I can't remember. He took it in good spirit, when he eventually sussed us out.
(IHateSproutsis baking a huge pie shaped like an enormous pie, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 9:41,
5 replies)

Mike Oxlong
Back in my college days, on one occasion we arrived to find that our tutor had not been supplied with a register.

A piece of paper was sent around the room for everyone to print their name.

After adding my own name to the list, I found a gap higher up and inserted (fnar) the name ‘Mike Oxlong’ (Actually suggested by another B3tan attending the same course)

Being an engineering course, and the tutor being an ex rocket scientist (no seriously), he tallied up the number of names, then the number of pupils and concluded that there was in fact an extra name on the list.

He then began to call out the names on the list, and once he arrived at Mike Oxlong, I gave he game away by erupting into laughter. Unfortunately my tutor had repeated the name several times, allowing everyone else to cotton onto what had happened before the penny finally dropped.

We tried the same trick with another tutor later that day, who simply told us to ‘fuck off’ and ‘bollocks to the register’

Other successful mind games included asking him if he considered ‘morning wood’ as a suitable construction material, and also screwing with computer admin trying to remotely log into a pc by hitting the space button as they were entering their password, thus locking out the administrators.

We also occasionally did some actual learning.
(Frample Tromwibblerclimbs an obstacle like old people fuck, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 7:01,
7 replies)

A friend and I...
... once devised a semi-immobiliser for cars. It works a bit like a normal immobiliser, in that you disable it when you want to drive, it kicks in when you lock the doors and set the alarm. And here's where the fun starts.

At idle or for the first five seconds (to give the engine time to stabilise), just work normally. After that, if the speed goes above 1100rpm, begin misfiring. Just drop a cylinder at random with the probability of missing increasing the longer the throttle is pressed - but always dropping back to a lovely smooth idle. Finally, after about 30 seconds, stop altogether.

We never had the opportunity to see if it worked well if the car was genuinely stolen, but it was a laugh giving people a shot of it to see if they could work it out. Certainly you'd easily catch any would-be car thief farting, lurching and backfiring their way out of the car park at a walking pace.
(gordonjcp, Sun 15 Jan 2012, 0:41,
2 replies)

I am an un-believing cnut. ALT: Stevie questions the cost of his faith.
I used to work with a young fella called Stevie who was of the born-again happy-clapping persuasion. He was also as tight as a bankers ring-piece the first night in pokey. As the person who had hired him I made it clear from the outset that his right to his beliefs also included my right NOT to believe what he did.

Which like many of that mindset he promptly ignored (I swear it's like they get into Heaven on commission based on how many souls they save or convert). Thus followed a couple of months of him telling us all about his wonderful church (in detail) & often pointing out to some of us our sinful ways and how we could repent for them if only we attended his church and took his god into our lives.

Can't really say what tripped it for me - it was probably the fact that he told me that my missus would go to hell for living in sin (a month before our wedding), despite the fact that he (as a mid 20's bloke) was wanting to pork a 15 yo. fellow church member - they were waiting to get married, I suggested waiting for her legal age of consent might be more prudent. But anyway a piece of straw fell on a camel and the rest, well...I decided to point out some of the hypocrisies of Stevies faith to him.

Many of the things I pointed out to him he simply said were a test of his faith. A few (memory is hazy) - Stevie was a long-haired rocker (who's band played in the church), but surely God thought rock & roll was the devil's music, The young 'uns were supposed to be celibate but Stevie clearly lusted after a girl 10 odd years younger than him and underage to boot. Apparently I was just being manipulated by The Devil in order to test Stevie's faith. It never fails to amaze me that those religions which require the most zealousness also seem to be the ones with the most hypocrisy.Now what really made Stevie sit up and listen was my views on tithing. Tithing is (correct me if I'm wrong here) when you give the church a percentage of your gross income each week so they can continue the good fight. From memory his churches "suggested" tithe was about 30%. Apparently no-one twisted your arm but you weren't looked on favorably if you didn't tithe regularly. Remember, Stevie's fiscal philanthropy outside his church made Ebeneezer Scrooge (pre-Tiny Tim) look like Bill Gates.

I pointed out to Stevie that he paid more in tithe than he did in tax. I also worked out how much money the church was making per week (Avg. no. of weekly members x tithe - 10% for people who didn't tithe/tithed less than the suggested amount). I also verified that his church owned outright the land and building he attended & that his pastor didn't need to live there as he had his own home. I also got a reasonable estimate of what the pastor was paid for his time. I also showed Stevie that his annual tithe was more than the amount he was saving up for his flash new car.The leftover amount of combined annual tithe after all the costs I could think of had come out came out to be a very nice "management level salaries (with Chrissie bonuses)" worth of tax-free dosh - AFAIK in Australia tithe is a non-taxable income for the church. I should state here that all of my guesstimates were conservative and erred on the side of less rather than more. So I asked Stevie, "Where was all this money going each and every week?"Which obviously got him thinking. And apparently made him go to question his minister. I'm guessing he didn't get a good response because Stevie stopped pestering us so much to go to church & eventually before he left many months later told us that he had left his church to attend another. A church that didn't tithe.Financial/mathematical logic over faith any day. Especially for us of the creaky, dusty wallet variety. EDIT: I'm also a complete cunt & going to Hell for making a bible-basher question his faith.
(Misery McUglywifean attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Sun 15 Jan 2012, 0:07,
4 replies)